Maruti Super Carry crosses 50,000 sales mark in 41 months

The Maruti Super Carry, Maruti Suzuki India’s sole commercial vehicle on sale in the domestic market, has gone past the 50,000 unit sales milestone. Zero to 50,000 has taken all of 41 months. Since sales began in June 2016, the Super Carry has sold a total of 49,137 units till end-October 2019, which is 863 units short of the milestone. Given the monthly average sales of 2,047 units in the past seven months (April-October 2019: 14,330), it can be gleaned that the Super Carry has driven past the 50k milestone in the first half of October.

As per Autocar Professional's industry sales statistics, the Super Carry has also notched its third best-ever monthly sales yet in October 2019: 2,429. The best monthly number was the 2,710 units in January 2019, followed by 2,582 units in March.  

Here's how the Super Carry's sales stack up since June 2016:
FY2017: 900
FY2018: 10,033
FY2019: 23,874
FY2020*: 14,330
Total: 49,137
*April-Oct 2019

The Super Carry mini-truck plays in the 2-tonne mini-truck segment, which is dominated by driver-cum entrepreneurial owners with Tata Motors and Mahindra & Mahindra the market leaders with an expansive range of products at competitive price-points. Piaggio Vehicles is the other OEM in this segment. 

Maruti records 14% growth in April-October 2019
While Maruti Suzuki, the dominant passenger vehicle market leader, would have preferred to see stronger numbers for the Super Carry, the mini-truck is slowly gaining acceptance across the country. In FY2018, the vehicle sold 10,033 units to get market share of 6 percent. In FY2019, it grew market share by 4 percentage points to 10 percent, with sales of 23,874 units, up 137 percent year on year, albeit on a low year-ago base.

In the current fiscal, in the April-October 2019 period, it has sold 14,330 units, a year-on-year growth of 13.81% (April-October 2018: 12,591).

The other three players have all seen their sales decline. Tata Motors with sales of 69,251 units is down 21% (April-October 2018: 87,782); Mahindra & Mahindra with 24,023 units is down 22% YoY (April-October 2018: and Piaggio Vehicles, with its Ape series of trucks and sales of 207 units is down 80% YoY (April-October 2018: 1,066)

The Super Carry has some distinct features along with the focus on driver comfort. The spacious driver’s cabin comes with ergonomically designed features like flat and extended co-passenger seat with a thick glass fibre heat shield for better heat insulation and NVH, a well-positioned gear lever and ergonomically placed pedals.

On the features front, it gets a mobile charging socket, dual assist grip, odometer, trip meter, fuel meter and digital clock, besides provision for a stereo. There is also an integrated rain guard, sliding back window glass, and conveniently located spare wheel carrier for ease of replacement.

Nevertheless, the Super Carry, has still a long way before it proves to be any real threat to the market leaders. However, the company’s decades-old hold on the competitive passenger car segment is any indication, then it would certainly look to make further in-roads in the mini truck segment to emerge a formidable player.